Originally Posted by
grampagen
Some time after he had awakened, Ochazuke had parted company from Aleka. He'd reached out to her and rest a hand on her shoulder - grateful, in his understated way - yet though his body had healed, the Acorian may have seen that it would take still more effort for his spirit to mend. As he walked off the ship and continued on to the Lookout, the harrowing experience of the twisted memory within his invaded dream left him shaken, and thus he had felt compelled to act.
The pieces are already in motion, only we have been unable to see their course.
It took a moment to settle himself back into the flow-state of Battle Meditation. Far from the familiarity of a dream, he knew well that a consummate awareness of sublime matters revealed about this world was as often a boon as it was accursed. In the examination of the moment, to find the truth of it in its totality was to be privy to any number of lingering presences that dwelt within them.
Their collective had stopped the Doctor's mad ambitions and this universe would continue on as it always had. The planet beneath their feet turned to see a new tomorrow, set apart from the hideous machinations of one who stood outside of it. Yet he found no respite in the face of this knowledge. That which would threaten us all has at last been put down. What stands before us now are the enemies that stand amongst us.
With all that remained to be done, his first action was to resume up where he left off. Immediately, Ochazuke surveyed the grounds for that corrosive, grey aura; but when he could not find the cold-blooded presence of Rex, that hardly put him at ease.
Indeed, both Cthylla's intrusion into the private sphere of his mind and what she told him there of those things beyond the parted veil shook him deeply, and put him on guard.
Many-angled entities roamed between the subtle spaces. The Eye of Auroc burned its gaze towards the Earth, even as his hand collapsed a nursery of stars. And then there's Alakazah... Together they had fought to secure the sight of one tomorrow, but against all the threats of the universe, of all those that still stalked upon his home and staked a claim over the lives of this world, for their sake he must continue to be vigilant.
So it was with a dull sense of solidarity that he knew that there had been a select few who felt the same. Their own Guardian Evangeline, after all, was but the latest in a line of successors.
Sequestered in the Lookout, far below the West Wing, there was an old shrine there. Uncharacteristically empty but for the hollows behind the pillars and the raised dais, there seemed to be as if platforms awaiting some player to cross its stage.
It had been quite some time since he laid eyes on this place. Two years ago he had deigned it immaterial to their struggles - Fife had fallen to hubris and a city vanished for it, and that had been enough. Today with all they knew, it seemed the conflict had grown far larger in scope, poised to prey upon so many other worlds besides the Earth. Having seen a fraction of this where the battles had maimed this world, Ochazuke could only feel increasingly powerless and small in the face of the greater cosmos.
But here in the depths of the Guardians' chamber, he had only his own footsteps for company, and the divine silence when he stilled. It was them he drew a small object from his person, and stared at it where it rest in his palm.
Arthur's Ring.
This dubious prize he had wrest from Glacia. Perhaps it had been a gift from the Doctor to this chimeric daughter, considered little more than a fixed quanity of artificial augmentation like the Dreadnought Heart and the metal Ishtar forcefully twist from her bones. No more potential than what had been immediately apparent as a vector for magic. He thought about how the Doctor must have ripped it from the cold, dead hand of the Guardian in some other reality. Just another means to a forceful end.
Certainly, there were differences between them, but like the relics of Zxu'ro he bore upon his person, there was a memory in the weight of these objects, and while he had little acquaintance with Arthur, it was a story he knew well.
Expanding his dominion over this world as the King of Kings, the people below began calling him something else.
God.
Tracing the nascent energies where they remained within this hollow chamber, he placed the ring upon his finger and focused. Evangeline had told them long ago she had pulled their fates to this point. The scars upon his heart, the end of his old life, the death of Arjan Kaibyo, that had been proof enough that there was nothing divine about the fractured ambitions of humankind. But in the face of all that they had lost, of all they yet stood to lose, he was growing increasingly desperate to hear some answer.
"You called yourselves Guardians. Where are you now?"